Rating the Songs
When starting out our survey, we searched online for known datasets that included musical pieces that were dissected on their musical components. This was important as we wanted to compare musical sophistication with musical pieces and we needed information about the structure of these pieces. Since this yielded no results, we decided to each supply 5 instrumental songs to a playlist on Spotify. These songs needed to be instrumental to control for the influence of language on the perception of beauty. After we compiled 30 songs, we then used 3 musical experts with more than 10 years of formal training to rate them on 9 components on a 10-point Likert-scale, copying the method used in the article of Aljanaki et al. (2016). The following components were:
Tempo: the general pulse of the song, ranging from very slow (1) to very fast (10)
Articulation: The rhythmic articulation of each song, ranging from very staccato (1) to completely legato (10), staccato are separate notes with rests in between, legato notes are notes that are strung together.
Mode: overall mode and feel of the songs, ranging from minor (1) to major (10)
Intensity: overall loudness and crescendos and decrescendos in a song, ranging from 1 (pianissimo) to 10 (fortissimo)
Tonalness: overall tonalness of the composition, ranging from (1) atonal, with no discernable mode or key to tonal (10) with no use of “outside” extensions and very clear discernable key and mode
Pitch: overall distribution of the pitches, ranging from all bass (1) to all treble (10)
Melody: overall presence and dominance of melody, ranging from very unmelodious (1) to very melodious (10)
Rhythmic Clarity: overall presence of a pulse, ranging from very vague (1) to very firm (10)
Rhythmic Complexity: the extent to which different meters, odd tempo’s or complex rhytmic patterns are utilized, ranging from very simple (1) to very complex (10)
You can see the distribution of the scores over 30 songs in the boxplot on the right.
Looking at the distribution, it becomes apparent that the components Articulation, Mode and Rhythmic Clarity are pretty well distributed, judging by the interquartile range (these are the coloured bodies representing the 25th and 75th percentile range of the assigned values), but nearly all components seem to cover a broad spectrum. Exceptions are the components Pitch and Melody, with Pitch mostly being rated between 4 and 8, indicating a slight preference for more treble within our selection and melody ranges between 5 and 9, indicating a slight preferences for pieces with a clear melody. Both have outliers in the lower ranges however, which could be used for the eventual selection as well to cover as much of the spectrum as possible.
After rating all 30 songs, we wanted to select 15 songs for our final survey. These songs had to be reliable in expert rating and cover most of the range of the 9 components.